ALPRs suck.

This is why I include nonsense descriptions for all my Venmo transactions.

I reject surveillance culture in my teaching, which means I don’t ever make a systematic effort to check for evidence of cheating or plagiarism, which just means that the obvious evidence I find anyway just makes me all the more angry.

Oh, so the moral panic is hypocritical, too.

Flock provides the ALPRs here in Lexington, which makes this especially frustrating.

Well, this sucks. Appreciate Ron Wyden’s diligence in this area.

Gift link.

This is a really important read. It’s why educational technology researchers should be concerned about more than “does it improve learning?"—and why our understanding of edtech needs to include all of these platforms, not just the obvious stuff.

Welp, this is scary.

Public-private surveillance is the worst of both worlds. Ring is creepy.

Facial recognition is the worst.

Team Firefox foreverrrrrr

Well, this sucks.

I’m torn between how much I dislike the idea of a connected car and how easy it just now made it to get a question answered at the local dealer. I guess we wouldn’t agree to all this surveillance if it wasn’t actually useful sometimes.

Some important—if disheartening—observations from Marwick.

Ew, gross, no.

Guns in schools are bad, but adding surveillance to schools is not the solution.

Hear hear. Ring is a creepy company, and we shouldn’t support them.

This sounds worrying to me. Surveillance can and will be abused, and we should be wary about embracing it on this scale.

Heading into finals, campus sent out a message about AI detection tools maybe not being trustworthy, which is great. However, this is in the context of these tools being wrapped into plagiarism detection software we already have access to, so they should say the same about it, too.

I had never thought of a car as a creepy surveillance device, but this is horrifying.

To my own surprise, I’ve been getting into audiobooks recently, and having listened to Doctorow’s “Walkaway,” I decided to revisit his Little Brother series in audio form. Parts of the first book haven’t aged well (including some language that was bad enough to be edited out of the print version I have), and while I enjoy Doctorow’s opinions, they sometimes overwhelm the story here. That said, to quote TVTropes, some anvils are worth dropping, and the messages about privacy, surveillance, and civil liberties are as relevant as ever, I don’t know if I enjoyed the book as much as I did my first time through, but I still like it enough to give it four hearts.

Important points in here.

Just because some worries about ChatGPT are, indeed, moral panics doesn’t mean that there aren’t legtimate criticisms of the technology—including from an educational perspective. I happen to agree with Masnick that schools ultimately need to roll with the punches here, but given how much we already expect of our schools and teachers, it’s reasonable to resent being punched in the first place. Masnick’s point about the error rate for detecting AI-generated text is an important one, though: I don’t think plagiarism-detecting surveillance is at all the right response.

This is dumb and gross, and another reason I’ll never use Spotify.

In the Canvas LMS main interface, it describes analytics reports as based on “near real-time data.” In documentation, it specifies that “near real-time” is “may be delayed by 40 hours.”